Limits to Growth Revisited

It was forty years ago today,
Donella Meadows taught the band to play
They've been going in and out of style
But they're guaranteed to raise a smile.
So may I introduce to you
The act you've known for all these years,
Donella Meadows' Limits to Growth.


.... Well, truthfully, it was forty years ago on March 1, but close enough.

This book, which sold over ten million copies in various languages, was one of the earliest scholarly works to recognize that the world was fast approaching its sustainable limits. Forty years later, the planet continues to face many of the same economic, social, and environmental challenges as when the book was first published. Suitably, the event has spawned a number of retrospectives. The most fulsome occurred at the Smithsonian where the Club of Rome sponsored Perspectives on Limits to Growth: Challenges to Building a Sustainable Planet. Among the presentations were the following:

• Dennis Meadows It is too late for sustainable development
• Jørgen Randers Lessons of forty years of promoting limits to growth
• Lester Brown World on the Edge
• Doug Erwin Biodiversity: past, present and future
• Richard Alley Climate change and energy; challenges and opportunities
• Neva Goodwin Labor’s declining share and future quality of life
• Panel discussion moderated by Eva Pell, Under Secretary for Science, Smithsonian Institution 

The full nine hour program -- including 10 minutes watching the audience mill about before the first presentation -- is archived at the above link.

For those who would like their celebration served up in a more time efficient manner, journey on over to Resilience Science where Garry Peterson has two interesting posts: Forty Years of Limits to Growth and Paul Gilding talks about Limits to Growth which includes Gilding's recent Ted Talk.

Reviews: Society in an Age of Uncertainty

Society, uncertainty, and three books that link the two as reviewed by Tom Slee at Whimsley

1) Everything is Obvious, by Duncan J. Watts

2) Adapt, by Tim Harford

3) Future Babble, by Dan Gardner

Complexity and the Empire of Illusion

Chris Hedges discusses his recent book Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. In it he offers an updated take on the argument advanced by Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death) and Bill McKibbon (The Age of Missing Information), i.e., that modern media are fostering a set of cultural practices which are maladapted to dealing with the increasing complexity of our social and environmental problems.

This is a position that I think has some merit, but also significantly oversimplifies. The ability to deal with complex problems requires a combination of both a) deep thought, analysis and understanding of a phenomena and b) a breadth of perception and awareness in order to appreciate the wide variety and diverse nature of relevant facts and processes. Crudely put, modern media don't facilitate the first in the same way as print. But, the ability to link, connect and juxtapose ideas that aren't put together for you by the author is dramatically facilitated by new media. As such, the problem isn't the existence of new media but, rather, finding the appropriate cultural mix of the different forms. In this respect, I'm waiting expectantly for Stephen Johnson's new book, Where Good Ideas Come From.

5 Books that will change how you think

Everyone likes lists. Here's my list of 5 key books related to ecological sociology.

1. Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Ingenuity Gap: Can we solve the problems of the future?

I like this book for three totally unrelated reasons: 1) it provides a thorough and lucid introduction into complexity and the idea of complex adaptive systems, 2) it provides a conceptual alternative to the tired debate between the neo-Malthusian limits to growth types and the economic cornucopians by shifting attention away from physical scarcity and onto factors related to the supply of and requirement for ingenuity and 3) it illustrates a way of thinking about the future in terms of the ongoing operation of long term historical trends rather than the analysis of hypothetical events or predictions around specific technologies.

2. Lance Gunderson and Buzz Holling (eds.), Panarchy: Understanding Transformations In Human And Natural Systems

A tour-de-force explanation of how complex adaptive systems operate. In contrast to the standard account which treats complexity as the product of a large number of factors all interacting with each other, Gunderson and Holling argue that complexity is the result of a comparatively small number of factors interacting within the constraints of a structured process consisting of hierarchically ordered adaptive cycles. They label this structure a panarchy.


3. E.A. Wrigley, Continuity, Chance & Change: The character of the Industrial Revolution in England

A path breaking study of the Industrial Revolution by noted British historian E.A. Wrigley, this work returns energy to its rightful place at the center of our understanding of the emergence of modern economic growth. If you're looking for a single place to explain the phase shift from traditional economic growth (based on organic economies and characterized by Malthusian cycles of growth and collapse) to modern economic growth (based on a mineral economy and characterized by several centuries of uninterrupted economic growth), this is it.

4. Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies

Where Wrigley focuses on the underlying causes of the main phase transition in modern socio-ecological history, the emergence of modern economic growth, Tainter wades through thousands of years of history to generate a theory of why complex societies collapse. His key points: 1) human societies are problem-solving organizations, 2) sociopolitical systems require energy for their maintenance, 3) increased complexity carries with it increased costs per-capita and 4) investment in increased socio-political complexity as a problem-solving response often reaches a point of declining marginal returns and, as a result, societies collapse. Detailed notes on the book are available here.

5. Bill McKibbon, The Age of Missing Information.

Not his best known work, but still my favorite. McKibbon knows how to write and this book, which contrasts his experience of watching a week's worth of tv against his experience of a week spent alone in the woods, will have you laughing out loud. At its core, this is a McLuhanesque interpretation of the world and, specifically, an analysis of the social and ecological consequences of living in an age of missing information where our understanding of the natural world comes more from the images and ideas portrayed in the media than it does from the direct experience of nature. To go full circle, the ideas in this book dovetail nicely with those in the chapter titled 'The Big I' in the Ingenuity Gap.

Hornborg, Part 4: Power in Resilience Theory

This is the final post on the work of Alf Hornborg. For the earlier posts, see Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

Hornborg's book is titled The Power of the Machine. In the book he uses the word power in two different senses; to reference both political/social power and mechanical power. The underlying claim is that these two forms of power are manifestations of the same thing; that the capacity of machines to do work is a product of power in the social world.

Hornborg's focus on power led to a rather interesting, if ultimately unproductive, series of exchanges between himself and the posters at Resilience Science. Like ships passing in the night, Hornborg critiqued resilience theory for its lack of attention to power while the resilience researchers offered up references to papers done within the resilience tradition that they claimed explicitly incorporated the analysis of power into the work. Ironically, both have a point.

Hornborg appears 1) to ground his critique of the perspective on a reading of the conceptual material describing the resilience framework (e.g. Holling) rather than a familiarity with the empirical studies employing the framework and 2) to mistakenly interpret the resilience framework as sharing a view of systems similar to functionalism and, hence, subject to some of the same critiques. Putting aside Hornborg's misunderstanding of the notion of system embedded in panarchy/resilience approach, the root of the argument turns on the distinction between a theory and a framework.

Holling, in "Understanding the Complexity of Economic, Ecological and Social Systems" develops the concept of panarchy as a means to elegantly account for the empirical behaviour of complex adaptive systems (i.e., by postulating a structure that allows a relatively small number of factors to generate the observed complexities rather than treating complexity as the product of a very large number of interacting factors). The concept of a panarchy involves three essential elements as diagrammed below: 1) a set of adaptive cycles (the sideways figure 8's in the diagram) that are 2) hierarchically ordered (from processes that are small scale and short duration to processes that are large scale and of long duration) and involve 3) processes of cross-scale interaction (the links labeled revolt and remember on the diagram).

Visual Representation of Panarchy as Framework and Metaphor

It is important to recognize the level of abstraction present in this representation. It is meant to apply generically to complex adaptive systems, whether they are social, ecological, economic or whatever. As such, it is a description of structure and processes that explain the general properties of systems, but does not theorize the operation of any specific system. To theorize the operation of particular systems, one must additionally outline the various 'controlling factors' that govern the operation of the various adaptive cycles associated with that specific system (as shown in the diagram below).


Visual Representation of Panarchy as Theory for a Specific System


Controlling factors for Adaptive Cycle A -->


Controlling factors Cycle B -->


Controlling factors Cycle C -->


Seen in this light, Hornborg is correct. The panarchy framework does not theorize power. However, the resilience researchers are also correct. Many empirical studies drawing on the panarchy framework have paid attention to power relations when attempting to 'fill in the blanks' and specify the factors responsible for the operation of the adaptive cycles in particular systems.

But, even if Hornborg read the specific empirical studies, I suspect he would still dispute the claim that the resilience researcher's had incorporated an analysis of power. The reason for this is that Hornborg advocates not just the incorporation of power into the analysis, but the incorporation of power theorized in a specific manner. To the extent that the resilience researchers incorporate power into their research they do it in relation to the specifics of the particular case and the theoretical proclivities of the individual researchers. Thus, viewed across the different empirical studies, the concept of power is not used in a consistent manner. Power means one thing in one study and another thing in a second study. In contrast, following Marx, Hornborg sees power as a very specific phenomena -- there is one dominant type of power (economic) to which all others are subservient. Thus, for example, he would recognize the coercive power held by the military but would argue that it is exercised in accordance with the interests of the ruling economic class.

This is where I part company with Hornborg. Historical analysis has showed that Weber had a better grasp on the concept of power than did Marx. Non-economic forms of power (military, bureaucratic, ideological, etc.) are often, but not always, subservient to the interests of the dominant economic elite. Thus, to preserve their explanatory utility in those situations where economic power does not trump all other forms, it is necessary to conceptualize power as consisting of a variety of independent dimensions rather than, as Marx does, as one dominant dimension that subsumes all other facets. For a concise discussion of this issue, see Chapter 1 of Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power Volume 1.

New Book: Thinking in Systems

A manuscript by Donella Meadows, the lead author of 1972's Limits to Growth, was published in August as a new book on systems theory called Thinking in Systems: A Primer. It's a posthumous publication (Meadows died in 2001) edited by Diana Wright of the Sustainability Institute.

"In the years following her role as the lead author of the international bestseller, Limits to Growth—the first book to show the consequences of unchecked growth on a finite planet— Donella Meadows remained a pioneer of environmental and social analysis until her untimely death in 2001.

Meadows’ newly released manuscript, Thinking in Systems, is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. Edited by the Sustainability Institute’s Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world, showing readers how to develop the systems-thinking skills that thought leaders across the globe consider critical for 21st-century life."

It's in paperback and available at Canadian booksellers for about $17.00.

Meadow's article, "Places to Intervene in a System" was first published in Whole Earth magazine in 1997, but received little attention. It is available to download here, reprinted by the software developer blog, Developer.dot.star. Software developers picked up on her theory because it has implications for software modelling of complex systems.

UPDATE: I just read "Places to Intervene in a System" and I have to tell you, if you don't have the time or inclination to read anything else about systems theory, you should just read this article. It's 19 pages long, and it's the most brilliant analysis of how to pragmatically change systems, and fundamentally, how they work.

Few and Far Between

I just picked up a copy of John Bellamy Foster’s Ecological Revolution. (This is not a review of the book, not yet anyway.) In the preface, Foster thanks his former graduate student, Brett Clark, who studied environmental sociology with him at the University of Oregon. Brett went on to become a professor of sociology at North Carolina State, and he wrote four of the chapters in Foster’s book.

That really struck me: the idea that a grad student was a continuing source of inspiration to an experienced professor, that a grad student could write four chapters of a widely read book under the auspices of one of the best and brightest in the field. That grad student is now a professor, but obviously a vital link in this very thin chain of ecological wisdom across North America. There are very few us out there, so few that each one of us is critically important to the whole effort, including, and perhaps even especially, grad students.

John Bellamy Foster was recently interviewed on Democracy Now along with Grace Lee Boggs, on September 17, 2009. Boggs and Foster commented on the ongoing financial crisis in the US.

Books about Panarchy

Two items from Paul Hartzog at Panarchy.com. First up is this visual diagram of the network of people and ideas tied to panarchy theory. Click on the diagram to see the whole thing.

Second, he's created a library listing of 200 books and growing about "panarchy" on LibraryThing.com. The list is as interesting for what is left out (no Holling!, no Homer-Dixon) as for what is included.